The other day I was listening to a national sports-talk radio show and they were discussing an prominent athelete's recent injury. They were expressing concern that the doctor who was treating the athlete (succesfully, it seemed) had treated other non-ahtlete patients with HGH and steroids.

Well, duh. This is what has driven me crazy about the whole steroid craze. Steroids were not invented to as sports performance enhancing drugs. They were invented because they had a variety of medical uses, including aiding recovery from certain injuries. Is the sports world really better off if we deny, say, Tiger Woods the injury-recovery tools that any non-athlete would have access to?

I will add here, just to tick people off and highlight yet another area where I am grossly out of step from the rest of America, that I have no particular problem with PED's in sports. It's fine if governing bodies for whatever reason want to ban them, but its not a straight forward case to me. These drugs have dangers, but getting our panties in a knot about people's informed choices on these dangers seems hypocritical to me as we routinely attend sports that have been demonstrated to cause, for example, major brain damage in athletes (e.g. football, hockey, boxing).

I suppose I get the comparability issue (people like records from 1900 to be comparable to those today) but to some extent this is outright hypocrisy as well. Don't modern training techniques, like altitude sleeping chambers, equally make a mockery of comparability? Baseball cries the most about steroids messing up the record books, then it does stuff like lower the pitching mound to help hitters and add the DH.

On the plus side, isn't there value to seeing our athletes play longer? Wouldn't it be nice (if you are not a Red Sox fan) to see Derek Jeter play a little longer? To see Tiger Woods return quicker from injuries?

And don't even get me started on the government's campaign to throw steroid users like Barry Bonds in jail. As I said earlier, I don't have a particular problem if private governing bodies choose, for competitive or marketing reasons, to ban PED's and enforce that ban within their community. But throwing Barry Bonds in jail for choice he made with his own body?

I saw some news story that Tiger Woods was going to publicly apologize. Why? What did he do to me? He is either good with his wife and kids or he is not. The rest of us are irrelevant. I suppose he could apologize to us for letting us down by under-performing his public image, but in turn we should all apologize for feeding like emotional vultures on his family's personal problems. Besides, he has taken a $100 million a year hit for the damage he did to his own image. I am willing to call things square between us.

If Tiger Woods winds up in Wickenburg for rehab over his apparent sexual compulsion and pill addiction, local businesses are ready.As the rumor mill seems to suggest, Tiger would be checking into the Meadows Rehabilitation Center in Wickenburg just after New Years, and despite being a little late in covering Tiger-gate's Arizona connection, the Arizona Republic reports today that local businesses are gearing up for golf's greatest Lothario.

For example, the owner of Sundance Pizza in Wickenburg, Bob Halsey, has already placed a sign in front of his store that says "Hey, Tiger, we deliver."

Chances of Tiger ordering some of Halsey's take-out are probably unlikely -- perhaps a more suiting sign should say "hey, droves of paparazzi, we deliver."

If Tiger does end up in Wickenburg, the number of paparazzi that will descend on the tiny town is certain to cause a boom for the local economy. Some tabloids are even rumored to have placed journalists in the rehab center themselves, in order to get the real dirt on the golf great.

Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do. From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.

The NYT reports on what looks like a well-reasoned study on officiating bias in the NBA. I say well-reasoned mainly because Steven Levitt, who has become famous for applying tools of economics to such problems, seems to be comfortable with their approach. The key finding is that white refs call fouls on black players at a rate .12-.20 fouls per 48 minutes playing time higher than they do on white players [note that most players don't play a full 48 minutes per game, so the actual rate per player per game is less]. Black refs show the same tendency to call more fouls on whites, though the article omits this rate.

That's obviously a bummer -- we'd like to think that stuff never comes into play. However, I would like to offer this bit of perspective: Sixty years ago, black men were not allowed in the NBA. Today, black men in the NBA, along with folks like Tiger Woods, are among the highest salaried people in the world. In 60 years, we have gone from total exclusion to a measurable difference of about 1 foul called every 10 or so games played. That's pretty good progress.

My sense is that we make snap decisions about other people based on a wide range of physical attributes, including height, attractiveness, clothing, tattoos, piercings as well as visible racial characteristics (e.g. skin color) and race-related appearance choices (e.g. cornrows). It would be interesting to see where skin color falls against these other visible differentiators as a driver of third party decisions (e.g. whether to call a foul). My sense is that 60 years ago, skin color would be factor #1 and all these others would be orders of magnitude behind. Today? I don't know. While skin color hasn't gone away as an influencer, it may be falling into what we might call the "background level", less than or equal to some of these other effects. It would be interesting, for example, to make the same study on level of visible tattooing and the effect on foul calls. My sense is that this might be of the same order of magnitude today as skin color in affecting such snap decisions.